Lets not forget about consoles too. Xbox Live and PSN complain about obstructive NAT configurations and rely upon uPnP to open ports.
Of course they can be opened manually but that assumes some technical experience, and that the ISP provided hardware gives you access to its configuration.
Normally people say games. I have disabled upnp on my firewall and there're two gaming PCs, a PS3, a PS4 and a PS5 running happily behind it. I just finished a Demon Soul's session with voice chat with friends with no problems. NAT type 2, because I managed my firewall to enable this.
It makes no difference since as I wrote I manage the firewall to allow this. But yes, since none of the games on consoles use Steam. If NAT wasn't set up I would get NAT type 3 on the PlayStations for example.
ETA:
My point was to get an example of something that breaks "because it doesn't work without upnp". I have yet to see a game that doesn't support a fixed set of ports.